The Mexican Focus Blog

Mexican Recipes are a healthy and of course delicious way to feed and nourish your family easily and fast. By including some of the more common staple ingredients into your shopping list - canned black beans, salsa, flour tortillas and refried beans - you can ensure that you have the vital ingredients for an easy and healthy Mexican inspired meal for whenever that mood should strike.

You can use the search function of our website to find tasty recipes that suit the ingredients you may have in the cupboard. For example if you type flour tortillas into our search box on our main site you will find over twenty recipes that use those key words!

Many Americans will eat Mexican food at least once or twice a week, and although Mexican recipes are well loved in the US authentic Mexican recipes are often much healthier due to less fat and smaller portion sizes. The traditional Mexican foods contain a lot of vitamins and proteins, spices and fresh vegetables.

So again the question arises.. is Mexican food healthy for my kids? Well Authentic Mexican recipes are because they are normally low in fat. America however has given Mexican food a bad name in some respects by fattening up the dishes making them not such a great choice. If you are heading out to eat with your family try and find a restaurant that will serve authentically prepared and cooked dishes, not only is it healthier it will taste so much better!

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day and what better way to start it than with a tasty Breakfast dish? Here at Mexican Focus we search far and wide for the tastiest Mexican dishes.

In traditional Mexico the majority of people go for Breakfast Tacos, which are relatively soft tortilla tacos that are filled up with several different stews.

Another option we can recommend is that you try our Mexican Breakfast Burritos recipe - this dish stuffed with cheese, sausage and eggs will absolutely melt in your mouth!!

Certainly if stuck for ideas you can always pull out a tortilla, add in some refried beans and call it your breakfast ( and many do ). However why not add a little spice to life and go for some variety!

Mexican Food is not always spicy and some that are traditionally so spicy are enchiladas, burritos and tacos. Mexicans do however use a large amount of chillies in their delicious dishes and this is where that spicy taste comes from. The majority of people like a little heat as it is definitely worth it to savor the flavor that you get from chili.

Most of our mexican dishes do call for chili in one form or another and it is a fact that most chillies are hot! It’s not always a good idea to leave them out as the recipe may rely on the strong flavor of the chili. Jarred or canned chiles and sauces are more often than not a little less potent than what some of the fresher versions may be.

If you love mexican food but don’t want it too hot there are some mild chili ingredients you can try..

• Chile powder
• Enchilada sauce (look for “mild” on the label.)
• Mild green taco sauce
• Green Tabasco sauce
• Canned green chiles

Chili peppers are used in a wide variety of hot and spicy foods around the world.

Chili peppers originally came from the Americas, particularly Mexico, and they are used worldwide today in different cooking styles.

Christopher Columbus took chilis back to the Old World over 500 hundred years ago and today more than 200 varieties of chilis grow around the world. The largest producer of chilis is India with Mexico being a clear second.

The “heat” in chili peppers is caused by an active compound, called capsaicin. Capsaicin is an irritant to mammals, including people, and it is believed that capsaicin developed as a natural defense mechanism for the chili peppers.

Capsaicin is found in the membrane of a chili pepper and this is where the seeds are also found. The seeds themselves do not produce any capsaicin, although the membrane capsaicin can leak out of the membrane and into the seeds. If you want to reduce the “heat” from a chili pepper then slice the pepper open, cut away the membrane, and seeds, and then discard them. This cuts the “heat” of a chili pepper to about 50% of what it would be if the whole chili were used.

You must take great care when handling chili peppers. I recommend that you wear kitchen gloves. You should certainly be wary of handling chili peppers if you have any cuts or abrasions on your hands, even if they are protected with sticking plasters, because the capsaicin can really make the cuts sting, sometimes extremely painfully. You should never, never, ever rub your eyes after handling chili peppers because the pain is excruciating.

The traditional measurement of the “heat” of chili peppers is the Scoville Scale.

The Scoville Scale is named after Wilbur Scoville who developed his scale of chili heat in 1912. He worked for a company that made an ointment for aching joints in which one of the important ingredients was capsaicin. The company kept getting different heat levels in the ointment when different chilis were used to supply the capsaicin and needed to know how to control this heat.

Wilbur Scoville developed a test where an exact weight of chili extract was diluted with a sugary water solution until a testing panel could not taste any heat at all. The amount of dilution required translates into a scale. The inherent weakness in this scale is that the taste test relied on people so the result was subjective and slightly inaccurate. But the scale was the first serious attempt at measuring chili heat and it survives, and is used, to this day.

There is a blog about the Scoville Scale on our associated Curry Focus website. The blog is called “The Scoville Scale of Chilli Heat”.

There is wide range of heat produced by different chilis. The mildest is the Bell Pepper that has a rating of zero and one of the hottest is the Habanero.

Chili peppers are one of the most well known cooking ingredients. If you want to find out more then you can find a huge number of articles about them on the internet.

Masa is used to make dough for,amongst other things, tamales, tortillas and empanadas.

Masa is a dough made out of maize (corn).

In dough form masa is called “masa de maiz” and in its powdered (flour) form it is called “masa harina”.

You can buy masa from your local Mexican, or Latino, store or good supermarkets (one of the leading brands is called Maseca).

You can substitute other flours for masa but you may have to experiment a little until you get the correct consistency in your dough with the substitute. The most popular substitutes are bread flour, all purpose flour and mixtures of corn flour and all purpose flour.

If you are finding it hard to find masa in your local store, you can always buy it online. Check out the Amazon.com link (at the start of this blog) for a range of suppliers.

If you buy masa and it is labeled “masa preparada para tamales” then the masa has been prepared to make tamales. If this is the case, then the masa may already contain baking powder and salt – check the packaging to see what the masa contains.

Try making tamales with masa – they are delicious.